Yes, I Am Still Playing FFXII

Over the past however many months, I have been posting the occasional updates on my progress through Final Fantasy XII and my quest to improve my general RPG-skills. Well, at this point, I have seriously been playing this game for probably a good year now. Maybe more. Probably more. I’ve lost track. All I know is that I’m around 186 hours at this point. 186! Frankly, it’s scary how much of one’s time RPG’s are able to eat up. Scary…yeah…

Well, seeing as I’ve made massive amounts of progress in this game since my last post on the subject, I thought I’d give you guys a quick update. While I am STILL not done, I am super close. It’s just that, at the moment, I’m locked in eternal combat with Yiazmat, so I don’t know when I’ll be getting around to the final stretch of the game. But I get ahead of myself. Like I said, I am super close to completing the story, though at this point, I have no idea what the game’s even about anymore. I see Bahamut on my world map. I’m supposed to go there…I think. I know nothing else.

As usual, my main focus has instead been on…everything but the story. I have obtained every Esper, including Zodiark, which was a total beast. I spent hours leveling up in the Henne Mines in order to beat this guy, only to give up and turn to tips online when that failed to secure my victory. Once I bought Black Masks and Bubble Belts for my characters, the battle was much easier, as the first item decreased the chances of getting killed by his Darkja attack, while Bubble Belt made my characters immune to Disease, one of the worst status ailments since that one in FF5 that makes everyone old, not to mention it doubled their HP, as well! Since obtaining all of the Espers, I have also realized more than ever that the Mist abilities in this game seem to be useless. The Quickening abilities rarely do even one point of damage, regardless of how long you keep the chain going, and as far as the Espers go, my characters usually die too quickly when forced to fight without their allies for the Espers to last very long. I tried both methods on Yiazmat. I used a bunch of those Quickening abilities, and I summoned Zodiark. Both attempts to damage him proved futile.

In addition to the Espers, I have also completed every Mark from 1-44 (there are 45 in total, the last of which is…you guessed it, Yiazmat), the biggest highlight being Gilgamesh. I vaguely remember fighting him during my first playthrough of this game shortly after it was released, but now that I have gone back and played some of the older Final Fantasy games from the SNES era, I was finally able to truly appreciate this bizarre character and his epic music. The Seer was pretty cool, too, and pretty easy, since I fought him after Zodiark. And at that point, all of my characters were level 89 or higher.

And now, all that remains before I complete the game is Omega, the location to which I have doodled a very helpful map, as he’s located in the deepest reaches of Giruvegan, Yiazmat, and the Bestiary, which I have very nearly completed. But man, if I thought the…um, Heck Wyrm was bad with his kajillions of health bars (he took damage very quickly; it was just rather overwhelming when I first entered the fight and saw those 50 additional health bars all lined in a row), Yiazmat is a thousand times worse. I heard this guy was bad. I heard he could take anywhere from three to seven hours to beat. Fortunately, you can save in the middle of the fight and return later, but that’s completely crazy! And as bad as such a long and tedious boss fight sounds, I predict that, based on my current progress through the fight, it will take me on the upper end of that scale to bring him down. As of writing this, I have whittled away 13 health bars in about two hours thanks to copious amounts of Hastega and Bravery.

I’ll admit that, at this point, I have kind of grown a bit tired of the whole strategy thing I had originally intended to work on during this most recent delve into RPG-goodness. People describe strategies against Yiazmat involving Decoy and Reverse, but rather than wrap my mind around it all, I’ll probably just stick with my simpler method, far slower though it may be. I guess…rather than spend time preparing for any of these strategies, I just want to start working on this battle without delay so I can get it over and done with as soon as possible. Once this blog post is done, I’ll probably get to work on hour 3 of the boss fight. My goal is to reach 20 health bars. I’m sure I can do it. Sigh…

Considering the fact that Yiazmat is a positively absurd baddie, I’m curious to ask, who here has defeated him? While I’m at it, who here has managed to defeat Omega and Zodiark? If you’d like, please let me know in the comments!